Robert A. Heinlein

"Value" has no meaning other than in relationship to living beings. The value of a thing is always relative to a particular person, is completely personal and different in quantity for each living human — "market value" is a fiction, merely a rough guess at the average of personal values, all of which must be quantitatively different or trade would be impossible. … This very personal relationship, "value", has two factors for a human being: first, what he can do with a thing, its use to him… and second, what he must do to get it, its cost to him. There is an old song which asserts that "the best things in life are free". Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. … I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money — which is true — just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion . . . and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value."

Come on, you apes! You wanta live forever?

I had taken a partner once before—but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open.

"You! I've just awarded you the prize for the hundred-meter dash. Does it make you happy? […] No dodging, please. You have the prize — here, I'll write it out: 'Grand prize for the championship, one hundred-meter sprint.'" He had actually come back to my seat and pinned it on my chest. "There! Are you happy? You value it — or don't you?" Mr. Dubois had looked surprised. "It doesn't make you happy?"

"You know darn well I placed fourth!"

"Exactly! The prize for first place is worthless to you . . . because you haven't earned it. But you enjoy a modest satisfaction in placing fourth; you earned it."

My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for scoundrels.

Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy.

" … I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms."

He sighed. "Another year, another class — and for me another failure. One can lead a child to knowledge but one cannot make him think." Suddenly he pointed his stump at me. "You. What is the moral difference, if any, between the citizen and the civilian?"

"The difference, I said carefully, "lies in the field of civic virtue. A citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not."

"The exact words of the book," he said scornfully. "But do you understand it? Do you believe it?"

"Don't you know about SGT's? ... They don't have mothers. Just ask any trained private." He blew smoke towards us. "They reproduce by fission ... like all bacteria."

The future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.

An invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.

Correct morality can only be derived from what man is — not from what do-gooders and well-meaning aunt Nellies would like him to be.

There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.